Conspiracy theorists unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
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My daughter has recently been diagnosed with an eating disorder, and she cannot get past wanting to lose weight, no matter that she's in hospital due to her heart rate having slowed down to alarming levels. She still wants it to go slower, as a challenge, as a goal, to show how strong she is in fighting her own body's will to live.
It's fucking crazy, but it's her reality. I do not understand how this kind of fantasy gets a foothold. I feel like the power of an idea is woefully underestimated.
Same goes with conspiracy theories. Maybe an idea has to fit like a puzzle piece into a real life scenario as a convenient surface-level explanation for something unpleasant or just unresolved.
I used to think the brain was a logic machine, but I think there are strong elements of it that are coping mechanisms. Cling to a fantasy that makes unpleasant thing less unpleasant. Don't know how that relates to potentially starving oneself to death, but that seems to be entirely on the table for ye olde brain.
Careful what you consider plausible folks!
I believe a necessary element is that people want to be "better" (eg. ahead, smarter, or etc) than others, whether that's having some sort of "secret" knowledge or just wanting to be a contrarian.
It can be fixed though — the hospital stay after passing out from low glucose levels finally straightened me out, but she really needs to figure this out for herself. Good luck.
It must come internally.
We keep working on what a wonderful happy life she used to have, hoping that such reminders will eventually seep in to create her own realisation.
The brain and body are effectively locked in a paranoid "fight" state - "I know this behavior is unhealthy, but if I don't behave this way, then [insert irrational fear] will happen."
If you can figure out what she is afraid of, you might be able to help her walk back the behaviors from there. But trying to correct the behaviors on their own is very hard. Since the fear is usually irrational, the behaviors may be a relatively rational response to said fear. They may hold the fear itself as table stakes - not understanding that they are afraid of something that isn't real (i.e. I will never find love if I'm not as skinny as the other girls on Instagram).
Again IME - the feeling from inside the self-destructive brain is "I shouldn't be doing this self-destructive behavior, but I don't know another way to achieve X goal, and I absolutely need to achieve X goal." Asking the question "Why do you need so badly to achieve X goal?" is usually a good start to defanging the fear.
Not the underlying fear that you mention, but seeing her reaction to being asked (forced) to eat is reminiscent of being asked (forced) to pat a spider.
I'm not sure if visceral, immediate fear maps to an underlying fear or not, but fear seems to play some part at least.
The first thing you should do when your kid is feeling something is to just say, "I believe you."
Don't tell her that she really is skinny, or that she really is beautiful, or that she's not thinking right. Don't tell her those things because what you're really saying is, "I know you better than you know yourself." That, unintuitively maybe, damages self confidence - where self confidence is really just "believing oneself."
If you plant a seed of doubt that she doesn't know herself and that others know more about her than she does...
(Obviously this is about validating her feelings and not validating self harm, which is nuanced and could probably use some professional direction or deep thought about how to approach this in a way which doesn't encourage deeper affirmation of the self image)
Anyway, I wish you luck. That sounds gut-wrenching and terrible. I hope you and your family can safely pull through on the other side.
A therapist is an independent person who is completely outside that persons life and their situation and is more likely to have the appropriate tools, or at least more so than a parent will (no matter how many TikTok’s they might see or blogs they might read).
And if she is resistant, explain that “this is someone who you can talk to; I don’t expect anything, I’m only asking that you just go talk with them about whatever you want. It’s not my business what you discuss, and I won’t ever ask you to tell me what you discuss. You can talk about your homework or the sky, it doesn’t matter, I’m only asking that you go talk to them. If you talk to them a few times and don’t like them, we can find someone else. Again, I have no expectations from this and I’m not trying to “fix” you, it’s just someone you can talk with and who might be able to make good suggestions about whatever you discuss…no more, no less”. And then, more importantly, you have to both believe and respect it.
She has been seeing a psych for a month or two (regarding her 'minor' self harm, the eating disorder hadn't "presented" at that time). She's generally pretty closed about her emotions, but she did start opening up after a few sessions. Not that it was able to prevent the decline towards the current situation.
We've asked her "team" at the hospital whether there's a psych involved in her program. They said no, for two reasons:
1. They're currently understaffed in that area
2. They need to get her weight / nutrition back to a baseline level because 'starvation brain' is, essentially, not worth working on - it's not functioning correctly.
Despite that, they said they'd still see what they can organise.
We've also started the process to getting an eating-disorder-specific psych booked for when she's discharged from hospital.
From the short post you shared, your daughter seems, for a lack of better words, possessed by this terrible terrible idea. Sadly, I have no idea (!) why some ideas stick to some whereas other won't attract ideas even close. But yeah, you are right, one should never consider their own thoughts to be absolutely true.
Sorry that you got this lesson is such a hurtful format. Hope your daughter gets better.
What we lost with religion is the belief in literal demons controlling people as an explanation for human behavior. Demons as metaphor is not a religious concept per se, and such metaphors still exist within secular society.
She is a chattel to what started as an idea but has grown into an entity to be obeyed.
I’m sorry about your daughter I hope she gets better.
in the age of AI/social media/etc. almost nothing is provably incorrect…
(attempting to be self-referential on the topic of beliefs and ideas)
You’ve heard of the “meme”? That afterthought of idea by Richard Dawkins? I first learned of it during COVID lockdown. There was a post—somewhere—linking to a post from NASA making a bunch of their publications available for reading. In these was a whole anthology titled Cosmos and Culture. One of the articles is by a professor and writer Susan Blackmore. She wrote an article, something like, What The Pandorans Knew. In it she makes the argument that what we will find, if we explore the cosmos past earth, is most likely not alien civilizations, but the remains of extinct civilizations. She argues that ideas are in fact dangerous and might just be the death of civilization. And with this in mind, we’re more likely to find evidence of the extinct civilizations than live ones.
It’s a radical idea. At least that’s what I thought until people in positions of trust started into their non-scientific medical ideas during COVID.
While I find memes of great interest, don’t expect to find memes beyond a curiosity.
The big problem is, what can you do with memes that you can’t do with the current academic orthodoxy? I think if it like someone espousing on the merits of their favorite programming language, and the main line language users scoff and say they have work to do.
Neither speculative non-fiction, nor meme theory, nor programming languages compare to the matters of health and wellness. This is the crisis of our time.
My2c
https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
I'm not in the "you should seek help" camp, at all, but for eating disorders in particular, randomized trials show that CBT is extremely effective, on the short and long term.
Post hospital discharge, hopefully in a couple of weeks, we'll be doing FBT (family based therapy, I think) which, according to this morning's information session, is rated above CBT in it's effectiveness.
There's a 12-month-ish program she'll be going into once she's recovered to a healthy weight / nutrition level.
FBT: Family Based Treatment. https://www.eatingdisordertherapyla.com/everything-you-need-...
I closely know an 18-year-old who decided to show his body that there are no limits in sport. He trains an insane amount of time (more than professional athletes) despite his body not following up.
He had a heart alert, and the cardiologist told him that the next time they will meet at his cardiac arrest, if he is lucky.
This absolutely did not change his mind.
He is intelligent, has ample opportunities to go forward in whatever he would like, lives in Western Europe, comfortable life and what not. He could be an excellent amateur athlete, competing at university level and doing well but he just wants to get his body past the breaking point.
The only hope is that he will mature enough to realize this in a few years, hopefully survive by then without serious impacts on his health.
Everything I the head, and this is an uncharted world.
I realized how difficult it is to relate to someone's mind without being the adult who tells you everything (and therefore you do the opposite)or to try to find ways to slow down the madness.
I hope that time will help him to mature.
https://cubari.moe/read/gist/Z2lzdC9mdW5reWhpcHBvLzcxMjRhZjU...
The desire to take it past the breaking point definitely puts them in dangerous-thinking territory.
At 18, though, I'm not sure how much help you can force on them. I'm vaguely concerned that, if my daughter has issues past 18 then what can a parent force given we're no longer a legal guardian? Could she call the police and we're arrested for some kind of restriction of liberty or kidnapping or something? She has literally said that she can't wait until she's 18 so she can leave and follow this starvation pursuit outside of our influence.
(the disease is horrible in that they literally are thinking and believing these things and there is no way to reason with "it" that doesn't reinforce the position - this is the first thing I've come across where logic and rationalisation are useless tools).
He is very happy with his body and eats a ton (and healthy) to build muscle and strength. It is just that this is way, way too much in terms of effort and time spent on exercising. There are plenty of articles on the topic of people of all ages who got addicted to sport and needed professional help to break the dependence. At least they wanted help.
His parents are not looking at forcing him to do anything, this is not in the picture at all. They want to help him. He has a good relationship with them and is leaving the house to study as expected (and normal)
The one treatment that finally broke the hold of her eating disorders was a live-in program at a hospital where all they did was, as a group, prepare and consume three square meals a day. It was like nutrition 101 coupled with some basic household management. Her words: "It had never been laid out like that for me, and I just didn't know it."
Does that mean it would work for your daughter? Maybe, but one obvious thing was that it was the right treatment at the right time for my cousin. A decade earlier she'd probably have blown it off or missed the point. The only thing I can say worked for her, is her and her family not giving up, hanging on and trying different things, until some magical combination of action and receptiveness met up.
As a friend to others with similar issues, I've seen the same thing: it's usually a lucky combination of action and circumstance. No treatment is guaranteed, no approach failproof. As you observe, the human brain is, in large part, a bunch of coping mechanisms (most therapists these days would nod excitedly at that understanding). It's not reasoning, it's reflexive defensives, and can take a long time to untangle.
Don't lose hope, and keep trying. And consider counselling for yourself and your spouse. This is traumatizing to you too, and getting support yourself to keep at it also helps.
Agree 100% that chances of beating it improve significantly with full family support, so that's what we're planning.
I'm fundamentally an optimist, and plan to remain so in the face of anything and everything.
The approach being taken (by the hospital) is to get her back to a healthy weight and level of nutrition before starting therapy because a nutrient starved brain doesn't respond to psychology / therapy.
Starvation hampers therapy, but without therapy the individual wants to starve.
I know words don't help much, but I sincerely hope her situation improves.
I'm fundamentally optimistic, and more optimistic now than I was a week ago.
The way the hospital gets past the 'not wanting to eat' is they give her a nose-feeding tube, through which they syringe a nutrition liquid. This is their base for getting them to non-starvation mode. My daughter had been eating enough to have tube removed a couple of days ago.
Having said that, it's a 12-month-ish program, and potentially a lifelong 'back of your mind' concern.
Biases that are strengthened by for-profit disinformation business.
Which raises an interesting point: In another time is sociological history, fringe thinking would have had to overcome a much more robust social challenge.
People "on the edge", who might have re-calibrated effectively, have become less likely to self-critique.
The conversation that no one wants to have is that American society is in a similar process of collapse, and conspiratorial thinking is only gaining traction because no one trusts that the state holds the general interest anymore. The real social challenge to overcome is government legitimacy.
If in our time conspiracies are perpetuated because of for-profit incentives, it is only because profit is what our society is structured around at a fundamental level. When the time for collapse has come, it brings itself into being by means of any and all existing institutions.
EDIT: and for the record, it's not about cognitive biases either. No one here has a real historical perspective.
In a world of razor thin survive/starve margins there's more incentive to keep things stable on the day to day and if that means we all gotta convince ourselves the king is ordained by god and Saddam did have WMDs (or whatever) then so be it, at least you all get to work the fields in relative harmony and importantly not starve, not having dissent is more important than getting to the truth on any one issue.
As society gets richer we need (in the strict "bottom of the pyramid" sense) social cohesion with those around us less so we're freer to adopt beliefs from wherever even if not shared with those around us.
If you're a staunch liberal or conservative and there's strong information flow where the authors are aligned with your own tendencies or talking points you have adopted, it seems almost frictionlessly neutral. Compared to info biased the other way where you notice quite fast and think "hey this isn't a neutral account" and quit listening right there.
It's even worse because it make actual neutral good-faith communication more difficult to recognize :\
When I think of "classical" conspiracy theorists, like the JFK assassination or the moon landings, I think of somebody who believes that they have special knowledge that most people do not have. They believe themselves to be a valiant minority struggling against an oppressive force -- one that has gotten to practically everybody except them.
I suspect that conspiracy theories have gone mainstream, and have categorically changed in the process. These beliefs aren't fringe any more. They may not be held by a majority, but they no longer need to seek out obscure chat rooms to share them. They'll be affirmed in the media, by politicians, and by many of their neighbors.
A signal of likely mental illness or a deliberate simulation of such by an unserious person.
It's unreasonable to reason with unreasonable people. - My late grandfather
Censorship, ostracism, and certain debunking styles are counterproductive in the sense that they harden the "conspiracy theorist" in his beliefs, confirming that "the establishment" is protecting sacred cows and forbidden knowledge. These approaches are unnecessarily combative and condescending. I think a more open approach is called for.
Sabine Hossenfelder handled "flat earth theory" in a way I found refreshing. She said, "Huh, this is interesting. I appreciate that they aren't afraid to question fundamental assumptions. That is a scientific attitude. But here's why I think they're wrong."
That's well worth doing when evaluating the merits of a potential conspiracy theory for yourself. However, it's not evident that this approach will convince people who incorrectly believe conspiracy theories of their errors.
Eponymous conspiracy theories have a built in 'immune system' to reject logical, scientific argumentation, since most if not all refuting facts can be attributed to the untrustworthy or malicious conspiracy itself.
Ultimately, scientific argumentation depends upon all involved parties having a shared understanding of what observed facts are true or false, and if that agreement is not there then otherwise rational parties can still reach different conclusions with no persuasion possible.
> Sabine Hossenfelder handled "flat earth theory" in a way I found refreshing. She said, "Huh, this is interesting. I appreciate that they aren't afraid to question fundamental assumptions. That is a scientific attitude. But here's why I think they're wrong."
Was this approach persuasive to any 'flat earthers', or was it instead interesting to watch as a 'round earther'?
Discussion about the topic is now hostage to whoever has the least understanding but the most willingness to interject.
At that point, it wouldn't be surprising to find experts leaving the conversation, to form more specialized groups to discuss the topic.
How would you solve this?
Before you reveal anything to them, make sure you are actually revealing reality and not just your version of the story.
Similarly, in general people tend to overestimate how much people agree with them, but you can overestimate by a little or by a whole lot.
It's my general observation that many conspiracy theorists are far more sure of "the truth" as they see it than the average person. This is also why so many keep banging on about it in any venue, whether appropriate or not.
The terms "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory" have very different meanings. This is essentially just a linguistic sleight of hand, not too different from when creationists say "evolution is just a theory". "Conspiracy theory" is somewhat unfortunate term.
Note that the article we’re discussing specifically mentions “people who believe in conspiracies” in the first line.
Which obviously refers to conspiracy theories in this context. Words can have more than one meaning (again: see "theory", among others).
Watergate was a government cover-up. No one denies that happened. Or Iran-Contra, or the Snowden leaks. Or the WMDs in Iraq.
Invariably, such papers use an ad-hoc set of beliefs that are labelled as false with no explanation or investigation. The authors just assume that because everyone they know believes something, it must be true. Ironically that's the same sort of faulty belief system they claim to be investigating.
Are you the kind of person who believes convincing sounding research from an Ivy League school posted on social media and wikipedia articles? Is your epistemology based in socialmediaism?
If you want a better differentiation, is computer science the same as magic? Is there no difference between the skills someone develops as a professional and expert in their field, and the lay person? Everyone has the same level of ability and willingness to understand a subject?
For example, did you read the article before commenting?
The idea here is exactly what you say, belief in authority because science people spend time on it. Essentially this is science as religion. Which was exactly my point.
Somehow I bet Kate Blackwood is certain that she's not on the fringe. She probably also thinks she's on the side of righteous change and history, something that already suggests she's not in the center of popular thought.
I'm sure she also feels that people who disagree with her are on the fringe.
Back in ye olden days if you said that someone was a conspiracy theorist it was a boolean that meant that they believed that literal conspiring was happening and now "conspiracy theorist" this whole diverse spectrum that people who believe various things are not exactly as portrayed exist on.
Oh how the goalposts of fringe have shifted over time.
Never mind how it shifts simply based on who you're asking. I'm sure there's beliefs that are fringe among the Cornell faculty who did this research that are wholly uncontroversial over in the maintenance department.
I think I see this most commonly in politics, where if <obviously bad> person supports an idea, then that idea must be also bad.
It can also just be a good heuristic. If a person or group/org with a reputation for dishonesty tells you an "idea", it's reasonable to throw shade.
> I think I see this most commonly in politics, where if <obviously bad> person supports an idea, then that idea must be also bad.
The conclusion is not always this direct, but it is completely reasonable to question ~why~ the obviously bad person holds that idea. What do they gain from pushing the agenda? Some people are so intellectually dishonest that everything they say is suspect.
IME, a scientific/empirical mindset tends to lead one to a state of epistemological modesty, in which few things are unassailably true, and beliefs are provisional until disproven. One crucial feature of that mindset is the notion of falsifiability. Knowing if/how ideas may be falsified helps one avoid leaping down conspiracy rabbit holes. <- (A likely unfalsifiable statement!)
/s?
Conspiracy theories are thus logically self-consistent theories, which effectively exclude all evidence against them as invalid. Therefore, it's impossible to counter them rationalistically, they can only be countered empirically.
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d5fz2_v3
The section on measuring over-confidence is interesting, specifically how they address the shortcoming of self-reporting confidence (if you're bad at the task in the first place, you're also going to be bad at estimating your performance, where the act of estimating resembles the task itself).
Another fun activity is to visit the appendix (p. 47) which lists all of the True and False Conspiracies used in their assessment.
There is then also the question of non-conspiracy fringe theories. Do people who believe them still think that they are mainstream?
"Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests"...
Compared to:
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability."
Okay?
It's always like this with such papers. 100% of them are pseudo-science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
I mean, take a look at the freaking Epstein episode -what the fick is that all about? If that’s not the “swamp” calling the shots, I don’t know what in hell is.
Everybody labeled him a kook at the time, mainly because this was just one of the many outlandish theories he had on the Free Masons and Illuminati.
And to muddy the waters even further, some people believe there is conspiring going on, some people don't. Some believe that it's so big everyone in DC is just kinda dropping it because they're all afraid they'll know someone on it or something like that. That is hugely different degree of "conspiracy theory" from the folks who believe something along the lines of the spooks have the list and are blackmailing everyone and of course there's beliefs everywhere in between. Some of the theories involve literal conspiring, many do not. The whole thing stinks to high heaven so much so that the idea that the official narrative is false is likely the majority opinion. Where do we even draw the line on what constitutes a conspiracy theory here?!
I do believe their coup worked. Next the views asserting this move into fringe conspiracy and the ouroboros continues devouring its own.
[1] but I am not just a rhetorician!
If there was anything characteristic about Biden to Trump voters it was that they didn’t watch or read the news much at all
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/democrats-need-to-face...
Klein would say he got a huge amount of hate mail from people who said the Times was not putting up strident enough headlines (won’t use the F-word or N-word for Trump) but that the kind of people who read the Times weren’t that the kind of people who need to be persuaded.
Psychoanalysis has been out of fashion for 50+ years but I also think a presidential candidate who looks like your mom evokes feelings of helplessness you had a a child which has to do why I couldn’t stand Clinton II and many blacks couldn’t stand Harris. In two years of chewing on it and people coming around I will have emotional and factual truth reconciled more than I have it now.
Politically, they decided to eschew Bipartisanship, primarying anyone who crossed party lines. Along side this came Limbaugh and later Fox, which became clearing houses to "just ask questions". See the success in platforming things like Intelligent Design, or Climate denial, giving them the imprimantur of credibility and authenticity. Republican politicans would then follow up by pointing to the news reports and rumors and stall bills, which would then become fodder for the news cycle, closing the loop.
There COULD have been independent thought and counter forces, but in the end consolidation of networks to stay afloat, and becoming part of the party means this is a pipe dream.
This is the engine that keeps our current doom loop going.
A distinction we don’t make enough in politics, marketing, McLuhanism and more is between early adopters and laggards. Zohran Mandami played well with young cosmopolitans and people in racially integrated areas but Clinton and Cuomo play well with laggards in all-white and all-black areas because they’ve been around, so does Bernie Sanders. Walking into a group of black nationalists as a 22 years old vanguardist and getting rejected was part of my origin story as an activist and lead but spending years listening to those people and telling the story I saw turned things around.
They platform narratives, and anyone not getting on board or supporting the current narrative is ignored and sidelined. This allows them incredible agenda and conversation shaping power.
Its why Trump can do product promotions from the White House lawn, say the sky is green one day and pink the next, without any penalty, and be seen as the Hero.
Its not rhetorical power, its Wrestling / Kayfabe converted into politics.
Yes, there are crazy people who think crazy things. There are also sane people who think "crazy" things might be true, but keep it to themselves out of fear of the social ostracization associated with being called a "conspiracy theorist." As designed.
Joking, but also not joking, back in the day a conspiracy theorist was someone who believed that something was explained by a literal conspiracy with literal conspiring going on. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry that thinks a press release isn't telling the whole truth gets to call themselves one. The reason the definition got watered down was for exactly the reason you state, various people found it useful to apply that label much more broadly.
It's become de rigueur to virtue signal how radically untethered one is to consensus reality, to the point that even on Hacker News, which is ostensibly full of rational people, you'll get ostracized far more for believing in the mainstream narrative than for questioning it.
Here's a good review of the science, which contradicts the assertions made above: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...